Awareness is thus not only intentional in character; it is also symbolic. The phenomenologist tells only half the story. I am not only conscious of something; I am conscious of it as being what it is for you and me. If there is a wisdom in etymologies, the word consciousness is surely a case in point; for consciousness, one suddenly realizes, means a knowing-with! In truth it could not be otherwise. The act of consciousness is the intending of the object as being what it is for both of us under the auspices of the symbol.
It does not, of course, solve the problem of consciousness to say that it is an exercise in intersubjectivity. I only wish to suggest that the conviction of the phenomenologists that intersubjectivity must somehow be constituted at the very heart of consciousness, a consummation devoutly to be desired but evidently not forthcoming under the phenomenological reduction, is illuminated and confirmed by the empirical method, a method which takes account of natural existences, organisms and symbols and objects, and real relations in the world. But I would also suggest that a recognition of the denotative function of the symbol, as a real property, yields the intersubjectivity which is not forthcoming from Mead’s sign-response psychology. Consciousness and intersubjectivity are seen to be inextricably related; they are in fact aspects of the same new orientation toward the world, the symbolic orientation.
This empirical insight into the intersubjective constitution of consciousness suggests an important corrective for the transcendental reduction. Is the phenomenologist’s stronghold of the absolute priority of the individual consciousness so invulnerable after all? Is there in fact such a thing as the “purified transcendental consciousness” or is it a chimera from the very outset? Is it a construct masquerading as an empirical reality? If my every act of consciousness, not merely genetically speaking my first act of consciousness, but each succeeding act, is a through-and-through social participation, then it is a contradiction in terms to speak of an aboriginal ego-consciousness. There may be such a thing as an isolated ego-consciousness, but far from being the apodictic take-off point of a presuppositionless science, it would seem to correspond to Buber’s term of deterioration, the decay of the I-Thou relation into the objectivization of the I–It. It would appear that the transcendental phenomenologist is seizing upon a social emergent, consciousness, abstracting it from its social matrix, and erecting a philosophy upon this pseudo-private derivative. But the organism does not so begin. The I think is only made possible by a prior mutuality: we name.
Sartre’s even more radical revision of the transcendental consciousness falls that much shorter of the mark. Declaring that the Cartesian cogito is insufficiently radical, that it is a derived condition of consciousness in which consciousness intends itself as an object, Sartre probes back to the “prereflective cogito.” This fundamental reality is a nonposited, nonobjectified, prereflective consciousness. But is there such a thing? Or is it not the very nature of the search that the most radical backtracking into consciousness cannot carry us beyond what Marcel calls the “intersubjective milieu,” by which he means the prime and irreducible character of intersubjectivity?
Mead’s major thesis was that the individual transcendental consciousness is a myth, that mind and consciousness are indefeasibly social realities. This thesis, it seems to me, is not borne out by Mead’s behavioristics, however refined, but is dramatically confirmed as soon as the peculiar character of the symbolic orientation is recognized.
Sartre would amend the Cartesian and Husserlian formula for the originary act of consciousness,
I am conscious of this chair,
to read,
There is consciousness of this chair,
both of which single out the individual consciousness itself as the prime reality, An empirical study of the emergence of symbolization from the biological elements of signification suggests the further revision of Sartre:
This “is” a chair for you and me,
which co-celebration of the chair under the auspices of the symbol is itself the constituent act of consciousness.
* I use the word “causal” without prejudice, to mean whatever the reader would have it mean in the context. It does not matter for the argument whether it is read as efficient causality or as a probability function.
* Cf. Marcel’s “Intersubjective nexus”: “…It is a metaphysic of we are as opposed to a metaphysic of I think.…But it is apparent by definition that what I may call the intersubjective nexus cannot be given to me, since I am myself in some way involved in it. It may not perhaps be inaccurate to say that this nexus is in fact the necessary condition for anything being given me….Without doubt the intersubjective nexus cannot in any way be asserted; it can only be acknowledged…the affirmation should possess a special character, that of being the root of every expressible affirmation. I should readily agree that it is the mysterious root of language.” (Italics mine.)
* When the two-year-old child discovers one day that the sound ball is no longer a direction, look for ball or fetch ball, but “is” the ball for him and me, he experiences a sudden access of recognition and joy which is something quite different from all previous need-satisfactions. (Cf. Ernest Schachteclass="underline" “According to Freud thought has only one ancestor, the attempt at hallucinatory need-satisfaction….I believe that thought has two ancestors instead of one — namely, motivating needs and a distinctively human capacity the relatively autonomous capacity for object interest”)